Posts Tagged 'Free'

Last week, Amazon Web Services unveiled the “AWS Free Usage Tier”. The idea is to encourage customers to experiment with the cloud, hopefully leading to a fee-based relationship sometime in the future. You can read about it here.

Free is always an interesting concept. Everybody loves free – free beer, free music, free love and now free cloud. The question that begs to be answered is what, exactly, does free mean when we are talking about an Amazon cloud. In other words is it an award winning Cigar City Bourbon Barrel Aged Hunaphu’s Imperial Stout or a PBR? There is little doubt that they are offering lots of stuff – storage, load balancing etc - but it ought to come with a caveat that reads “If you intend to do anything other than play with this, please think again.” The service offered is clearly not robust enough for much else beyond experimentation. A company that plans on presenting an application via the cloud to internal or external customers must simply make other arrangements. Limited RAM, combined with no processor guarantees and no service promises make for a poor business decision.

So, is this really a bad offering? The answer is no it’s not, just so long as everyone maintains a cool head and remembers what it is for – experimentation and education. And this makes it a good offer. Amazon is effectively helping to seed the marketplace for the cloud by providing a free platform to encourage a wider audience to dip their toes in the cloud. There is little doubt that some will transition from this offer to a full blown, fee-based service with Amazon because they generally do a good job. The great thing is that as the market educates itself about the cloud, SoftLayer will also benefit. We are very good at what we do and it simply makes sense to have a SoftLayer discussion when a company gets serious about the cloud.